Susan Robb's sculptures, photographs, audio work, and built environments transform common objects into ideological hybrids between flesh, nature, and technology. Drawing on empirical observation, reflection, and imagination about my immediate surroundings and contemporary social issues, these hybridizations are open-ended investigations into the kaleidoscopic intersection of culture and nature, addressing the intelligence of nature and dynamic systems.

SUSAN ROBB WARMTH, Giant Black Toobs, 2007 More than a billion tons of trash are dumped into the ocean every year. Oceanographers have found a swirling miasma of consumer plastics—plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic toys—the size of Texas in the pacific ocean . Plankton, fish, birds, and marine mammals all ingest these plastics (and the chemicals they contain and leach), which in turn we ingest. Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with biochemistry, uncovering how plastics not only effect planetary health but are also linked to cancer, diabetes, and endocrine malfunctions. Like Andy Warhol said, we are indeed (and literally) all becoming plastic. In Warmth, Giant Black Toobs, I use solar power and ambient breezes to give life to the ever-present black plastic garbage bag. Polypropylene garbage bags, 50 feet tall by 30 inches in diameter, are inflated with air by allowing the wind to fill them or by running with them. One end is staked to the ground; the other end is free. The sun does the rest. Employing a similar principle to that of hot air balloons, the sun heats the air inside the toobs, and since hot air is less dense then cold air, the toobs become buoyant. Solar-produced buoyancy, breezes, and internal convection work to transform this symbol of the (American) cycle of consumption and waste into seemingly sentient creatures, live plastic hybrids whose choreography brings to mind the very sea creatures our epoch’s mass of waste effects.

SEA-ICE LIFE BOAT is a poetic and far-fetched attempt to equip Alaskan polar bears with a large raft made from oil barrels resembling sea-ice but impervious to global warming. Carberg, an image directly related to the Sea-Ice Life boat Project, depicts a lonely polar bear stranded on a “carberg”, an SUV shaped iceberg, both the cause and the tongue and cheek solution to the bears habitat dilemma.

The Challenge Nature Provides, 2007 Photography Size and edition to be determined The Challenge Nature Provides is a series of sensual images of my body covered with prosthetic animal bites. The title combined with the almost painterly quality of light and the post-coital drape of my body speaks not of an attack by nature but of the welcoming/wanting of it.

Power Flowers like Carberg is created in Sketchup. It uses the conventions of landscape painting to depict a brightly colored field of flowers that are seemingly created out of cardboard. This image originally printed in Rivet Magazine came with a packet of Power Plants, soil remediating plant seeds. Readers were asked to plant the seeds in derelict land and then send Rivet images of the thriving plants

The four-channel audio installation "Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment" transforms audio speakers and speaker-wire into a field of flowers whispering, “it’s in the air” “It’s in the water” statements that at once seem menacing and sublimely true.

foundation, equalize, sustain 2006 water color and gouache, steel shelves, resin, rocks, light 15 x 20 inches $2,500 After spending months researching rocks, crystals and minerals, japanese rock gardens, and traveling to the South West to look at rock formations and go caving I created Foundation, reverb and Sustain (plus painting and wall installation). Again, this work channels communication that supposedly objects around us are engaged in. The abstracted painting are of building ripping through the ground to reveal black rocks that emit rainbow sound waves. The rocks in the three tiny rock gardens (aided in "growth" by the blue light) can be lifted to reveal similar colored waves.

modern erosion, reverb and sustain, 2006 Water color and gouache 15 x 20 inches $1,200

fossil, philosophy, phonography, 2006 Water color and gouache 15 x 20 inches $1,200

Macro-fauxology, 2006 Photographs 10 x 10 inches; 44 x 90 inches overall Installation view, Henry Art Gallery

In the relational work "I’m Not Here, 2006" a phone message instructs viewers to create the piece in my absence, resulting in an organic and highly synergistic collaborative installation in which written language creates an enveloping environment and I playfully attempt to erase my self from my own work.

"The Sense of Another Dimension, 2004" a month's worth of field recordings captured at the 2004 Whitney Biennial are transformed into glitchtronica tracks (and those tracks into the ever present cell phone ringtone). The work samples the museum docents “authorized speech” and the everyday sounds of New York creating a mix that talks about chaos, culture, and uncertainty. By offering these songs as the ubiquitous ringtone I turn the cell phone into a transmitter of affordable, populist, mobile art.